DROPPED Immersive Citizens - AI Overhaul (by Shurah)

[Astakos]

Hello Shurah,

 

Thank you very much for this update.

 

Apologies for posting these sort of questions here but the comments section in Nexus is locked...

 

1. Having a look at TES5Edit I noticed that in some of your quest edits, the conditions from Hearthfire that are not forwarded (especially the ones that check if a child, mostly Britte and Sissel, belongs to an adopt-faction). Is this intentional? I am asking this because you do not list HF as a requirement for your mod so I do not know if you have checked up against it when editing your quests.
2. There seems to be an NPC (actually a horse; xx7180F3 <EnnisHorse>) that has a very weird name (non-English alphabet - Bjφrnbδr) and is not referenced (used) anywhere. Is it needed for some purpose?
3. There is a quest conflict with AS-LAL at conditions at "001034DF <WERoad01>". I remember you saying that you mod is compatible with AS-LAL...what's the deal for this conflict? I am loading ICAIO after LAL.

Thank you! 

[TheLolrus]

With yesterday's update covering the CRF patch, are we good to use it, or are its fixes already rolled into the STEP Compilation?

[EssArrBee]

With yesterday's update covering the CRF patch, are we good to use it, or are its fixes already rolled into the STEP Compilation?

I'll be updating the STEP patches today or tomorrow. The current STEP patches are fine to use until then. 

[shurah]

As long as you're using ENBoost, you won't have to worry about the 3.1GB memory cap.

On a low rig, without using ENBoost, even by filling all the aliases, I couldn't see a increase use of RAM in game with Skyrim Performance Monitor, once the plugin loaded in a save. If some people have doubts, it's easy to check by yourself anyway.

 

Hello Shurah,

 

Thank you very much for this update.

 

Apologies for posting these sort of questions here but the comments section in Nexus is locked...

 

1. Having a look at TES5Edit I noticed that in some of your quest edits, the conditions from Hearthfire that are not forwarded (especially the ones that check if a child, mostly Britte and Sissel, belongs to an adopt-faction). Is this intentional? I am asking this because you do not list HF as a requirement for your mod so I do not know if you have checked up against it when editing your quests.
2. There seems to be an NPC (actually a horse; xx7180F3 ) that has a very weird name (non-English alphabet - Bjφrnbδr) and is not referenced (used) anywhere. Is it needed for some purpose?
3. There is a quest conflict with AS-LAL at conditions at "001034DF ". I remember you saying that you mod is compatible with AS-LAL...what's the deal for this conflict? I am loading ICAIO after LAL.

Thank you! 

1. It's intended, because it will require to use Hearthfire as a master file to forward these conditions. You can forward them if you want, but in practice, you won't see any differences because these extra conditions are unnecessary.

2. This horse was intended to help Ennis to travel from Rorikstead to Whiterun, but I got a ton of problems to bypass to get a satisfying result. Once I figured out the limits of the game engine, I stopped to work on that feature. I kept it in the plugin, because maybe with the help of some little scripts, I will be able to get the result I want.

3. I forgot to forward this change, you can do it by using TES5edit. Not a big deal if you don't. If you don't, you will be able to encounter 2 farmers who fled from an dragon attack, even if you didn't inspect Helgen.

Edited December 19, 2015 by shurah

[Astakos]

Thank you very much Shurah for your reply.

Will do as you recommend!

 

Great update by the way...I just need to find some time to redo everything ETaC-oriented as to exclude Rorickstead!

[Darth_mathias]

hello I throught I would just mention that ever since I updated to v0.2.3, I have noticed that the miners in the Quicksliver mine in Dawnstar don't actually do anything they just stand inside the mine near the enterance you can talk to them and the will responsed but they dont move i.e they dont mine any ore. I have noticed this both on an old save game and a new character.

 

EDIT: I can confirm that it is ICAIO cos deactiving the mod and the miners are well mining, reactiving and there just standing around near the enterance of the mine doing nothing.

Edited December 22, 2015 by Darth_mathias

[TechAngel85]

hello I throught I would just mention that ever since I updated to v0.2.3, I have noticed that the miners in the Quicksliver mine in Dawnstar don't actually do anything they just stand inside the mine near the enterance you can talk to them and the will responsed but they dont move i.e they dont mine any ore. I have noticed this both on an old save game and a new character.

 

EDIT: I can confirm that it is ICAIO cos deactiving the mod and the miners are well mining, reactiving and there just standing around near the enterance of the mine doing nothing.

Do you have any mods editing NPCs besides ICAIO? Can you check for conflicts using TES5Edit?

 

I haven't started a new game yet with my STEP install, but I know that there is only one NPC conflict in STEP, but it's nothing breaking. Just some stat changes forwarded from Cutting Room Floor.

[Darth_mathias]

Do you have any mods editing NPCs besides ICAIO? Can you check for conflicts using TES5Edit?

 

I haven't started a new game yet with my STEP install, but I know that there is only one NPC conflict in STEP, but it's nothing breaking. Just some stat changes forwarded from Cutting Room Floor.

I use SRLE so any conflicts are taken care of with Neo's patch I also do have immersive Wenches I have installed the compatibility patch. This little bug is by no mentions game breaking just "immersion breaking" 

just throught Shurah should be aware.

[shurah]

hello I throught I would just mention that ever since I updated to v0.2.3, I have noticed that the miners in the Quicksliver mine in Dawnstar don't actually do anything they just stand inside the mine near the enterance you can talk to them and the will responsed but they dont move i.e they dont mine any ore. I have noticed this both on an old save game and a new character.

 

EDIT: I can confirm that it is ICAIO cos deactiving the mod and the miners are well mining, reactiving and there just standing around near the enterance of the mine doing nothing.

Hello,

 

It works perfectly fine on my side. So either you have a plugin clashing with ICAIO at the navmesh level or you did a unsupported use of ICAIO such at merging the compatibility patches for ICAIO together or with ICAIO.

[Darth_mathias]

Hello,

 

It works perfectly fine on my side. So either you have a plugin clashing with ICAIO at the navmesh level or you did a unsupported use of ICAIO such at merging the compatibility patches for ICAIO together or with ICAIO.

OK I dont what it was they just stood there for like 20 mins, after I quit and reloaded they started behaving normally again.

 

the only mod i can think of is immersive whences ICAIO patch

Edited December 23, 2015 by Darth_mathias

[shurah]

OK I dont what it was they just stood there for like 20 mins, after I quit and reloaded they started behaving normally again.

 

the only mod i can think of is immersive whences ICAIO patch

 

Note that, for now, my plugin doesn't edit the AI used by the Dawnstar's citizens, except if they are in a combat state or if it's raining or snowing. So it may be a vanilla bug.

 

 

Btw, I found this: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/9313-can-i-ignore-these-errors-during-the-merging/

So it's official, the merge script from Mator damages my plugin and my compatibility patches (apart the ones for ELE & ELFX) by breaking several connections between navmeshes.

Edited December 23, 2015 by shurah

[Darth_mathias]

ok something for me to keep an eye on then.

 

BTW I don't merge your plugins

[Nearox]

A few interesting analyses regarding compatibility of this mod with other mods, were published by a few authors over at Reddit. Mostly Arthmoor, Thalassa and Nazenn (of JK Lite). 
 
I'm not posting this here as a discredit to the author, but rather to forward you some of the insights that said authors have given regarding the compatibility with city mods. Some are rather critical of the communications they had with shurah though but that is not the point. The point is that there is substantial debate concerning the idea that compatibility might not be as big as an issue as shurah thinks/claims it to be. Again, I'm way below their (shurah, Arthmoor, Nazenn etc.) skill level, but I think it is good to realize there are different opinions. Not about the quality of the mod, nobody questions that, but rather about the claims of incompatiblity. All in all, it makes me a little more optimistic for being able to complete SRLE - EE and/or REGS  one day. 
 
Either way, I did find the thread quite interesting, so posting it here for reference.
 
EDIT: For you hopefuls out there, just to highlight a quote from Arthmoor:
 
Link Removed
 

So far as I can tell, there's no reason Nazenn's work on JKs shouldn't be entirely compatible.

 
The below has been edited to remove some of the unnecessary to impolite comments from these posters.

 
A few excerpts:
 
Thalassa:

Shurah refuses to share any information about the mod, how it works, and his points on incompatability are inconsistent at best. (For example, he said he tested JK Lite and Superlite and saw many bugs with them, but according to his own notes they should be compatible. Also, he says a lot he's tested various things like the ETAC patch, and it's always "I tested for 5 min" or "10 min" and "I saw lots of bugs" but never saying what the bugs were, whether they were even related to the mod he was testing, and 5-10 minutes is a ridiculously short test time anyways.
Myself and a few others (Rusey, Nazenn, and I forget who else) tried to press him to be more specific on his reports of incompatability, and to give more detail on things like "any mod that changes navmesh or architecture is incompatible" since... like... the way Skyrim AI works, that shouldn't be the case. It's not like Combat Evolved or follower mods or any other AI mod is saying that. But he deleted every comment on that topic from the thread, locked the thread, and blocked me from his mod for saying that... so... yeah.
IMO if he's discovered awesome new things about how Skyrim AI works he should share it... sharing that information will give him a ton of credit. Hiding it does not.
And if he hasn't well... why did the mod take so long?
Arthmoor has taken a look at the mod, as well as MissJennaBee, and from what they've said and my own amateur look at the mod, here's basically how it works:
It alters several navmeshes. I believe this is to patch bugs in the vanilla navmesh, which Arthmoor said there were many unfixed, but I'd have to look at the CK to be sure. As far as where it edits navmeshes, it's all over the place; I think his compatibility article details where he's worked on.
It adds some new Xmarkers (read: locations for NPCs to do things) to Whiterun and Riverwood. Maybe a dozen to Whiterun.
It edits a few dozen vanilla packages by adding new flags from the CK to them (things like, allowing NPCs to have random dialogue during a particular package).
It adds (I didn't count, this is an estimate) about 300 new packages. Normal vanilla packages are applied directly to the NPC. These are not.
Here's how the mod works:
It has a bunch of very very detailed new packages. Something like 4-6 per NPC in whiterun and riverwood, and then about 15 "go home" packages that are generic to each other location in Skyrim.
The new packages are then placed on a quest that runs at start of game and (according to Arthmoor) this quest alias is given highest priority. This is a really sane way to do things (Arthmoor's own mods do this now) because it improves compatibility with other mods that touch NPCs (which is, like, all of them), and because it allows a very clean uninstall (I think. Not sure). However, the downside is: These packages are always running. If the NPCs dies, is disabled, whatever, the game engine is still using this alias on them and still trying to calculate these packages. The number of quests that run at start of game is also very large and that is what causes the initial massive load screen.
There are about 20 of these package-applying quests (again: didn't count, estimating) that are added. Whiterun and Riverwood are complete: The NPC packages are totally re-done by these quests. They will completely supersede any other packages as long as the conditions specified in the quest are met (which, given the number of packages, they should). The other cities pretty much only have the "go home" quest, and therefore normal vanilla packages will be active when the "go home' conditions are not met.
The mod directly edits a few NPCs (mostly carriage drivers and the like), and also adds some horses (which I hear do hilarious things).
The package references Xmarkers (for example, one NPC has a package where any marker to look at a map/book/etc. etc. is a valid target, and he'll just use the closest one). I still don't see how navmesh is important other than making sure NPCs can get where they're going.
Nazenn reports that when he moves the archery targets from where Shurah placed them to a more logical location, the NPCs continue shooting at Shurah's location rather than the new marker, so I'm not sure what's going on there but that could be a clue.
The bug that seems to bother Shurah the most is when NPCs can't achieve whatever they're designated to do, and they stand there a minute trying to figure out what to do next. This is because of Skyrim's absolutely terrible AI engine. It happens in vanilla sometimes (pretty often actually). I've heard rumors it happens with only ICAO running too, so it's not like you're going to get rid of this bug entirely.
(This comment is no longer stickied on ICAO mod page but the third stickied comment used to be something like "I am a french citizen and the government has an option to get two years salary to work on anything, freelancing, art, game design, whatever. I wanted to learn about AI in video games because AI in video games is so bad. So I decided to make a Skyrim mod that overhauls AI. The two years is nearly up and so I need to find a new option to support myself. This mod is what I did."... )

 
Arthmoor:

I've tried to tease out the vanilla bugs he keeps saying he's fixing too but I can never get a reply back when I ask. I'm not sure if he just doesn't want to share the info or if I'm simply not coming across clearly enough. Vanilla bugs are something I'd like to see get fixed so they're not bugs anymore - for everyone, not just his users.
A couple of minor details in your otherwise great analysis:
The quests have relatively LOW priority. HIGH priority would cause them to block everything else and would probably break half the vanilla game. I'm pretty sure most of his AI stuff is down in the 20s which is fine.
When the NPCs die, it is true the aliases don't clear, but the game also stops calculating their AI. Dead NPCs don't do much more than take up memory space because of how he's done things, but the more NPCs he covers in more area, the more aliases he'll need, and each one takes up space that is never released. In addition, any NPCs that don't have a corpse cleanup script will never be purged from the game. (This is the reason I don't use the mod btw, beast or no beast, Skyrim's memory is too precious to waste, and his initial load screen takes 10+ minutes to process)
Navmeshes are only important to guide where the NPCs are allowed to go. The vanilla game has some buggy ones, but in the areas he's modifying, they're really not that bad so I don't know why he thinks he needs to fix them. Stuff around Whiterun and Riverwood were already handled by the USKP anyway.
As far as other mods being incompatible, that's only a problem if he's sticking AI markers in places other people are sticking buildings or other clutter. I know there's a lot of Whiterun mods, but I don't think a single one of them breaks vanilla AI so I'm not sure why a "vanilla AI enhancer" has to worry so much about it.
If there's some other reason why mods would be incompatible, he simply hasn't said. If he's not going to say, then that leaves the rest of us to analyze it with what we know and make our determinations that way. So far as I can tell, there's no reason Nazenn's work on JKs shouldn't be entirely compatible.
Regardless, purging questions and answers and then locking the thread doesn't exactly help anyone.

 
 
Arthmoor

I guess so but when you tell people something isn't right and then don't give them the details it makes it awfully hard to try and do something about it. Most people will look for the obvious conflicts, and when they find none, scratch their heads wondering what's up. That's the case with ICAO. There's no obvious conflicts. So long as his markers aren't buried under buildings it shouldn't matter one bit as long as the navmeshes are sound.
I was digging around in his aliases to see how he handled the fleeing from dragons stuff but couldn't quite piece it together. Asked for some pointers, never heard back. I'll probably dig in some more at some point cause I wanted to see if I could make RFYL and WVA use more reliable AI routines that don't need scripts on them since the scripts flake out sometimes.

 
Nazenn

just gonna hijack Thallassa's fantastic top post here and place my own thoughts because I've been mentioned a few times in this and other comments and I have a few things to add.
One thing to note about compatibility is this: Shurah claims that he is the only one capable of doing compatibility checks. We can do checks all day in the CK and for hours in game, but every time he is pressed Shurahs response is that no one else has the knowledge to do it so only his compatibility info should be considered reliable. This is part of what's making it so hard and so frustrating to actually try and find answers on exactly what he is changing and what makes things incompatible because he is not just dismissing our work, he's dismissing the collective knowledge of the entire community in favor of his own. I'm not saying he doesn't have a lot of knowledge, he has 4k hours in the CK after all, but between the rest of us, I'm certain we have more and there's some very talented navmesh-ers and CK users here, so unless he can say what he's found that so wonderful, I've become EXTREMELY skeptical of his claim that he has all these magic skill and CK secrets no one else knows about.
 
On some other points:
The alias' fill at run time. This means all NPCs you have in your game will be affected when you first load the game with the mod. Every NPC. That is a LOT of memory being used up by the alias' if you run mods like Inconsequential NPCs etc, especially as Arthmoor pointed out, those alias' never get cleared from the game properly so they are always taking up a lot of skyrims precious memory. It also means that any NPCs you add AFTER you load your game with the mod that first time will NOT be affected by the mod. This includes the dragon and vampire attack feature where the citizens hide. Shurah claims his mod replaces that, (and in now deleted description comments he use to claim his method was objectively better and should always be done like that), however if you plan on adding NPC or quest mods in stages, you still need Arthmoors scripted versions to be able to make sure that all NPCs will be safe. The same for Wet and Colds Go Home feature in rain.
I've had two people so far that I've helped troubleshoot on steam have their memory issues resolved after removing ICAIO on a heavily modded game. It uses a lot of memory and it is something that people REALLY have to keep in mind when installing this mod especially on games which already have a lot of other mods installed.
We can't make true compatibility patches for the mod right now because Shurah refuses to give permission, and anyone who makes one by editing parts of his esp and releasing it as a separate esp as a patch gets threatened with a ban. Part of the issue with this is nexus' weird permission descriptions, as it specifies assets so a lot of people don't realize you also need permissions for esp edits etc. On top of this Shurah doesn't speak English well. This means there is a language barrier in our communications which I'm fully happy to acknowledge, and there are some people in the community that Shurah goes to for clarification and to help with this side of thing, however our attempts at clarification (aka, saying over and over we aren't expecting him to make patches but him still saying he doesn't have time) haven't gone well.
 
I'm also going to put this out here right now (with huge amounts of regret):
I'm in the middle of making JKs Lite Towns. The Lite version will only be performance, the SuperLite will be compatibility focused. If by the time I get to the SuperLite version of the towns sometime next year the situation hasn't improved, aka there isn't more info and more respect coming from Shurah towards those who are trying to help with his mod, JKs Lite will no longer be supporting ICAIO. I hate saying it, but I'm not going to waste my time fiddling blindly with the CK to try and make patches for a mod without any info on the mod, and I will not waste my users time in publishing potentially buggy updates one after another trying to fix the issues.

 
Nazenn

For the moment I'm still sticking with my stance of JKs Lite is compatible as far as I can tell. Shurah hasn't added it to the incompatibility OR the compatibility listing of his article, which is annoying, but either way, I have done all I can (other then fix those blasted archery targets, why did he decide they had to be sitting on a WALL!) so I really don't know what else to do at this stage. I'm more frustrated then anything else.

 
Nazenn

I don't mind STEP including it, but I felt REALLY bad for some of the STEP pack authors who suddenly found half of their pack mods incompatible with STEP core because of its inclusion. I know at least one pack has been abandoned because of it.

 

[EssArrBee]

Is Nazenn talking about REGS? I don't follow packs like should so I'm unsure what is still active.

[TechAngel85]

Yeah. I have plans to revive it, but I'm sort of waiting to see how this compatibility thing goes. From what I know about modding with plugins and in the CK, what they are saying above is not wrong and I see their points.